Monday, December 29, 2008

Edu Text Links Still Proving To Be More Valuable

By Steve Prylon

Search engines are known for collecting information and using that information to rank certain sites higher than others. When they find a link on a high rated site, that link will be valued higher than if the same exact link was found on a lower ranked site. Links from sites with a .gov or .edu suffix are considered trusted and authority sites and are considered very valuable. Also, links that come from high ranked PageRank sites come with high value.

Though most SEOs know this, you do still read the occasional naysayer. There are even one or two very prominent industry stars that insist they are no more valuable than any other link. This is really just not true. If you run a test on 2 sites, and add .edu links to #1, and standard links to #2, you definitely will find site #1 to rank higher. At Edutextlink.com we have tested this, and we see very regular evidence that they .edu links are taken more seriously by search engines.

If you do any random search, you will very often see .edu and .gov sites ranking in the top 10, even when they are not the most relevant, or even when they are outdated. This is more proof that they are not treated the same as a .com or .net.

It is probably true that the algorithm is not written to put a blanket boost on any link from a site with .edu as the tld. If someone were to start a brand new university tomorrow, links from that site may not be valuable. But the fact is that most of the .edu sites are very old, very big, full of information, trusted sites, with tens of thousands of inbound links and high PR. It is this reason that the search engines seems to be placing more importance on the links.

Yes, there are one or two naysayers still, but by and large, the industry places high value on .edu text links, as do the search engines. We will continue to run with the crowds and continue to use .edu text links. The phenomenal results we're seeing with our clients rising swiftly to the top in search tells us we're doing something right.

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